Last week, I ventured a whopping 15 minutes from my house to see robots do some mind-boggling, jaw-dropping stuff.
\n\nI visited the Cambridge, Massachusetts, offices of a startup called Generalist AI, where I watched robot arms perform simple chores like stacking cups, putting blocks into bowls, and the like. I was astonished by how quickly they figured things out—it was reminiscent of a flesh-and-blood person.
\n\nThe arms mastered a range of tasks after ingesting a short, instructional video and, most impressively, no specific training for a given task. One of the most striking examples involved a robot that was instructed to sweep a block into a bowl using a dustpan and brush. When the brush was removed from the scene, the robot improvised by using the dustpan like a brush and flicking the block into the bowl.
\n\nIn another case, a two-armed robot watched a videoclip of someone unzipping a purse before removing some banknotes. I watched—somewhat slack-jawed—as the robot unzipped a different kind of purse and carefully removed the notes. Most amazingly, when it couldn’t grab the money, it switched from using its right gripper to its left to get a better angle of attack. “Ha,” said one engineer…
Original source: https://www.wired.com/
